The impeachment committee's former counsel, John Door, 53, went for speed. Stephen Smith, 47, opted instead for some fancy figure work. Meanwhile, Ethel Kennedy, 46, who was holding the ninth Christmas skating party for the children of Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant ghetto, got to know her guests. "Hold me up please," she joked to a small muffled figure wobbling round the newly opened local rink, built by a fund-raising organization begun in 1967 by her late husband Bobby. Just a couple of days later and across New York City, former Mayor John Lindsay, 53, went skating too. Not on thin ice, but at the Rockefeller Center Skating Rink where, with Co-Host Diahann Carroll, 39, he taped an ABC Christmas Eve special, refereed an ice-hockey face-off, then jumped into a sleigh with Diahann to sing (in Sunday churchgoer's baritone) It's Beginning To Look Like Christmas. Taking a break, Lindsay suddenly spun out on the ice and asked a member of the chorus to join him for a Dutch waltz. Said Diahann admiringly: "He's the kind of man to whom you always want to extend a hand of help. I think it's his vulnerability."

Is Elizabeth II proving as arbitrary and demanding as Elizabeth I? Rumors were rife in London that Richard Burton's new romance, Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, 38, had folded her dreams and stolen back to the shelter of her London house, leaving Richard alone in his Alpine chalet. The rift was said to be caused by Richard's bouts of drinking, which even visits to a faith healer had failed to cure. A friend was reported to have said: "Before Burton swept her off her feet, Elizabeth thought her husband was dull. Now she realizes she could never endure a relationship with Burton." But Elizabeth's banker husband Neil Balfour, 30, did not drop his divorce suit against her, and Richard sent an emissary over to woo her back. The last court-circular announcement came from Burton: "Princess Elizabeth and I are going to be married." And he added: "We shall be together at Christmas." -

When Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Institute offered Author Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) an honorary degree, he turned it down. "I don't believe in degrees," he said, accepting instead an honorary mechanic's license. Arriving for the ceremonies, Bach cut an unconventional figure on campus, attired in a black leather flying jacket and white parachute-silk scarf. Come January, Embry-Riddle is in for more surprises. Bach, whose most recent book is A Gift of Wings, will teach a 15-week two-credit seminar on "philosophy of flight." The curriculum should elicit gasps from commercial pilots and shudders from airline passengers. The students "will have to spend an evening some time between midnight and dawn alone with an airplane and see what happens." And if a cybernetic relationship is successfully established, "they're going to have to do nothing but sit and listen to an airplane running." Is this love? "They're going to have to go back and say, 'What called me? Why did I come to aviation in the first place?' "

Actress Lynn Redgrave, 31, has of course studied Mrs. Warren's Profession, Shaw's groundbreaking play about prostitution. She learned a lot more while recently filming The Happy Hooker, in which she plays the protagonist, Xaviera Hollander. Last week in Toronto she finally came face to face with the real thing, Xaviera herself. "She'd make a good hustler, wouldn't she?" said Xaviera, 31, approvingly, after their first meeting. Lynn described how her craft differed from Xaviera's tricks: "An actress reads from the script, while a lady of the night improvises." But the only improvisation done by Xaviera lately has been in the drama classes she is attending in a continuing attempt to go legit and stymie the Canadian government's efforts to deport her. "So far," she giggled, "I've lost every appeal but my sex appeal."

Trips abroad with wife Princess Margaret leave nothing to adventure, so last week Lord Snowdon, 44, was reveling in the Australian outback on yet another safari out of the tame preserve of Windsor Great Park. "I average, for a month, 80 miles an hour," he said in Sydney last week as he began filming for the BBC an account of the ill-fated trip into Australia's interior in 1860 by two British explorers, Robert Burke and William Wills. Traveling in a light plane with his producer, Tony planned to follow the pioneers' trail from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. "We're going to be wandering," he said. "I don't know where or how long. We'll just land and bed down for the night."

It is just a simple Early American kind of store. The quilts sold in Granny's Cabbage Patch seem a little high, but then the shop is in one of L.A.'s poshest suburbs, Brentwood. The owner seems surprisingly glamorous, but then she is Pop Superstar Cher Bono's mother and an exactress. The shop's name is perhaps just a little cute. But then, as Granny Georgia Holt, fiftyish, explained, it has a very serious purpose. As she and Cher, 26, arrived with Granddaughter Chastity Bono, 5, for the official opening, Granny Holt explained: "Chastity had never heard of the Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch stories. But she knows them now."

Devils all over the country will be disturbed to learn that a sequel to The Exorcist is being planned. So far, the original movie has grossed more than $140 million, despite the brouhaha over Mercedes McCambridge's voice and Eileen Dietz's body being used in some of Linda Blair's scenes. Who will be possessed this time? Probably someone whose voice and body can be used throughout.

Move over, Howard Cosell. "I don't want to be just a tennis player," said Billie Jean King, 31, last week. The five-time Wimbledon singles champ and four-time Forest Hills singles winner who in 1971 became the first woman athlete ever to earn more than $100,000 a year announced that she had won a two-year contract from ABC Sports. Her salary is estimated to be in six figures. "I would never take less than a man," she said succinctly. Between commitments, King will comment on a variety of network programs, cover the 1976 Olympics, and discuss athletic issues on a new magazine-type program. ABC'S veteran sports announcer, Howard, was on hand to welcome Billie Jean. Just to make sure nobody got the impression that he was afraid of a newcomer whose vinegary ripostes may overwhelm his own from-the-battlefield style of reportage, he stepped over and gave Billie Jean a kiss.

For McGeorge Bundy, 55, and Theodore Sorensen, 46, it was almost like home movies as they watched re-creations of themselves act out their original parts in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Jean Kennedy Smith, Husband Stephen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were among the other guests who gathered in the Sorensens' Manhattan living room to watch ABC's special, The Missiles of October, when it was aired last week. The party was subdued; the handful of friends and followers of the fallen Kennedy brothers were clearly moved by the resemblances to Jack and Bobby of Actors William Devane and Martin Sheen. A dramatization of events presented with the doggedness of a documentary, Missiles won some praise from Historian Schlesinger: "It was a simplification, not falsification, of events." But former Secretary of State Dean Rusk had objections. When Nikita Khrushchev, who was played by Howard da Silva, recalled the Soviet ships, Rusk said, "We didn't jump up and down like schoolboys whose team had scored a touchdown. The episode was a little naive." As for General Maxwell Taylor, he was disgusted with Actor Andrew Duggan, who took his role. Huffed the general: "He would never have made the 101st Airborne."

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